Sourcing Passive Candidates: What We Teach Our Recruiters on Day #1

More than 95 percent of our candidates are sourced. That rate has held steady since 2012 when Recruiting Social began serving clients.

Today, you’re going to learn how we do it.

This guide reveals everything we teach our recruiters about sourcing on their first day. First, we’ll show you how to figure out important details about the target candidate. Then, we’ll teach you how to use search engines to find them, out there on the web.

Contents

CHAPTER 1

Sourcing 101

In recruitment, sourcing means finding candidates for a job opening. But let’s dig a little deeper.

An active search

Unlike the “post and pray” method of posting a role and waiting for applicants, sourcing is an active search for potential hires. It focuses on passive candidates: people who aren’t actively looking for a job.

Traditional sourcing resembles professional networking:

Attending industry conferences, panels, and workshops

Hosting mixers, meet-ups, or happy hours for professionals in a particular field

Asking colleagues to refer possible candidates and make introductions

Many contemporary sourcing techniques are web-based:

Using advanced search techniques on Google or other search engines

Searching profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or other social networks and online communities

Sifting through resume databases and professional directories

Retrieving idle or forgotten resumes from an Applicant Tracking System

This guide will help you start practicing the latter, digital methods of sourcing candidates. But don’t be afraid to close your laptop, put down your phone, and go meet people in person!

Process

The sourcing process typically involves:

Defining the targetcandidate you aim to find.

Building a list of qualified prospects, an activity called research or name generation.

Role Details

Qualifications

Next, talk to the hiring manager. Ask questions to determine where to direct your search.

Past/Current Employers

Which competitors’ employees should you target?

Universities

Which schools’ graduates?

Geography

Should you look outside the local area? Where?

Other Job Titles

What other or related job titles might candidates hold?

Other Industries

What other industries might they work in?

Online Hubs

What social networks, websites, or platforms do they frequent?

Put this information into a single document. You’ll want it handy when you start combing the web for prospects.

CHAPTER 3

How Search Engines Work

Search engines are the main tool recruiters use to find candidates online. Let’s take a peek under the hood.

Beyond basic googling

Hear “search engine,” and you probably think “Google.” It’s the world’s most popular search tool, used for nearly three-quarters of all web searches. Think of “googling” something, and you probably picture a short phrase or question typed into the Google search field. Press Enter, and you get a list of results.

But basic googling doesn’t make for effective sourcing. Not when you need to find qualified candidates who meet specific criteria. And while Google is a powerful source of answers, different keywords and search strings deliver different results. So do different search engines.

To source, you need to go beyond the basics.

True or false

In 1847, an English Mathematician named George Boole published a book titled The Mathematical Analysis of Logic. In its pages, he outlined a new kind of algebra where values could either be true or false.

This binary logic, called Boolean, became the foundation for how all digital electronics, computers, and programming languages work.

Why does this matter?

Boolean is the language of search engines. By understanding Boolean logic, you gain a powerful tool for finding candidates on the web.

Boolean logic

Search engines use keywords – descriptive words, terms, and phrases – to understand what you want to find. The relevance of your results depends on the specificity, combination, and organization of your keywords.

Boolean operators allow you to combine or exclude keywords:

Boolean operators

AND

Results will include both terms. You can also use an ampersand (&).

Examples:

resume AND portfolioresume & portfolioresume & portfolio & email

OR

Results will include one or both terms. You can also use a vertical bar ( | ).

Examples:

resume OR cvresume OR cv OR profileresume | cv & portfolio

NOT

Results will exclude the second term. You can also use a minus sign (-).

Examples:

resume NOT jobsresume -jobsresume OR cv -jobs

Boolean modifiers organize keywords to expand or refine what they mean:

Boolean modifiers

“Quotes”

Results will only include the exact phrase. Enclose multi-word terms in quotation marks (“”).

Examples:

“vice president”“senior software engineer”“san francisco”

Wildcard*

Results will include all variations of the term. Use an asterisk (*) at the end or in place of a word.

Examples:

recruit* =
recruiter; recruitment; recruiting

consumer * goods =
consumer packaged goods;
consumer durable goods

(Parentheses)

Results will include specific variations of the term. Wrap OR statements with parentheses ().

Example:

sales (director OR vp) (seattle OR tacoma OR redmond)

Terms to know

search enginen. software tool that indexes, searches, and identifies information on the web.

keywordsn. words, terms, or phrases you enter in a search engine. Also called search queries.

stringn. combination of words and characters you use to conduct a search.

Booleann. binary logic resulting in a value of either true or false.

operatorn. simple words used to combine or exclude keywords in a search.

modifiern. characters used to structure search strings.

CHAPTER 4

Searching the Web

What should you type in the search box? It’s time to combine keywords with Boolean and hit “Enter.”

Choosing keywords

How do you select keywords? First, refer to your candidate profile. Look back at the job description, too. If your company employs people in a similar role, check their LinkedIn profiles.

Note that we’ve enclosed OR substrings in parentheses. We’ve wrapped the term talent acquisition in quotation marks so results include the exact phrase.

Why did we also wrap recruiter and resume, single words, in quotation marks?

This helps to counteract auto-stemming: when search engines seek the keyword as entered, the root word, and related words formed with other suffixes. For example, recruiter might also turn up results with the words recruiters, recruitment, and recruiting. Resume might also turn up results with the word resumes, plural. But in this search, we only want exact matches for the word recruiter and resume. Quotation marks help us do that.

Instead of (tech or technology or technical), we can use tech*. The wildcard symbol (asterisk) helps us search for related variations of tech. We can do the same with -hir* and -job* to exclude variations of hire and job.

CHAPTER 5

X-Raying Websites & Social

What is X-Ray search?

Google seattle sales manager and you get more than 2.3 million hits – yikes. Strategic Boolean can help pare back those results, but you’re still covering the entire internet.

Sometimes, though, you know where you want to look:

You might want, for example, to scan a competitor’s website for employees in the sales department. Or maybe you want to dig through a sales industry forum for potential candidates. Perhaps you only want to search LinkedIn for profiles, Indeed for resumes, or Dribbble for portfolios. Maybe you want to try finding talent based on Twitter bios. Or, clever as you are, you might want to uncover a website’s hidden or unlinked pages and documents.

Yeah, you can do all that. The technique is called x-raying. To use it, you’ll need to learn a few search commands: